Annual RC21 Conference 2011

The struggle to belong. Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings
Amsterdam (The Netherlands), July 7-9 2011

Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research – Urban Studies
University of Amsterdam – The Netherlands

10. Negotiating social mix in global cities

Organizers: Gary Bridge, Tim Butler

10.1 Negotiating social mix in global cities

Chair: Tim Butler. Discussant: Patrick le Gales.

Sylvie Tissot (University of Strasbourg)
Loving diversity/controlling diversity: the dynamic of inclusion and exclusion in American upper middle class culture.

Stéphanie Vermeersch , Marie-Hélène Bacqué , Eric Charmes , Yankel Fijalkow, Lydie Launay (LAVUE)
Constrained gentrification? A Paris case study

George Morgan & Sherene Idriss (University of Western Sydney)
The Geography of Creative Aspiration: Class, Ethnicity and Mobility in a Global City

Martine August (University of Toronto)
Negotiating social mix in Torontoʼs first public housing redevelopment: Community development, cohesion, and criminalization in Don Mount Court/Rivertowne

10.2 Negotiating social mix in global cities

Chair: Gary Bridge. Discussant: Paul Watt.

Talja Blokland & Julia Nast (Humboldt University Berlin)
Truce, tectonics and the meanings of the passing-by: on the relevance of absent ties for understanding belonging in mixed neighbourhoods

Melissa Butcher (The Open University, Dpt. of Geography)
Distinctly Delhi: Affect and Exclusion in a Crowded City

Annick Germain (Institut national de la recherche scientifique)
From social mix to ethnic mix? Montréal experience at the crossroads

Emma Jackson (a) and Michaela Benson (b) (a: King’s College London, b: University of Bristol)
‘Not deepest darkest Peckham’: The middle classes and their others in an inner London Neighbourhood

Abstract: This article examines how middle-class residents of an inner London neighbourhood draw up socio- spatial and symbolic boundaries between themselves and their ‘others’. Through a discussion of accounts of two very different boundaries, the boundary of a multi-ethnic high street and a less clearly defined boundary of a neighbouring middle-class area, we argue thatt the production of middle-class identities is bound up with processes of disaffiliation not only from proximate stigmatized areas, but also from more up-market areas and the people who populate them. Against this background it becomes clear that middle-class claims to belonging are made through (1) the asymmetric processes by which the middle classes create and maintain spatial boundaries between themselves and racialized/classed others and (2) the subtle processes of distinction that go on within the middle classes. Nevertheless, relationships to place remain ambivalent, and as neighbourhoods undergo change, physical boundaries separating one area from another refuse to stay put. We argue that the re-inscription of such boundaries in the accounts of the middle-class respondents are attempts to create a stable identity on the shifting ground of the contemporary global city.